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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

It is snowing in Connecticut and while it looks beautiful on the trees and the kids get super excited, it just adds a bit of the unknown to my day and I am having a hard enough time keeping it together as it is.

Our driveway is totally iced over. The half inch of fluffy white snow did nothing to break my fall. I was wearing snow boots, but perhaps my balance was a little off because I was carrying my bag, a computer bag, a small lunch bag, the Lady's backpack and a pair of black boots.

Thank goodness I had the foresight to hand the Lady my travel coffee mug or things could have gotten really ugly.

As it was, I just ended up with some wet pants that I tried to dry quickly by turning the seat heater up to extra high.

I have been driving the Lady to the bus stop in the morning because it has been in the 20's here and I don't want our nanny to have to take all the kids out in freezing cold weather. It has been nice to have some time alone with her in the morning and it actually makes my mornings a little bit more manageable because I have a few extra minutes to spare before we have to get out the door.

My hubby is finally getting home from California tomorrow, although it will be late at night and I will have one more solo evening of trying to deal with getting everyone to bed in a manner that has been nothing close to routine.

In the course of the last two weeks, I think I have slept by myself a grand total of two nights. The Little Lady--who is suffering from what I think are night terrors will wake up, run down the stairs (if she isn't already sleeping on the couch), come into my room repeating the phrase "I want to go home" over and over again and then when I ask her what she is afraid of points out into the darkness and says "that."

Talk about creepy. This means that it takes me about another 30-40 minutes to fall back asleep because I don't like scary things and I kept on popping up to look around the room. After I saw Scream in college all my roommates were sleeping out and I put all the lights on in our place because I was afraid to sleep there alone. I wish that this was a one time deal with the Little Lady, but it isn't and it is clearly the same reoccurring dream. I am thinking about putting a little Holy Water on her while she sleeps. Couldn't hurt right?

The other issue is QT. A few nights ago I thought I heard someone out in the living room, when I called out I got no answer. About 20 minutes later the Little Lady came down the stairs and I heard her say "QT what are you doing?" before coming into my room and asking to sleep with me (I said no, fast forward a few hours and see above paragraph for how that night ended).

When I went out to see what was going on, I found him wearing only a diaper, his feety pajamas cast over his hockey sticks in a toy bin, lying on top of both his blankets, with a poop in his pants, totally passed out.

Repeat the same scenario last night (sans poo) and I think you can get the sense that things haven't been going that great at bedtime here. I did put QT back in his crib, only to have him back in my bed around 3 a.m. where he proceeded to sleep on me for the remainder of the night and where I heard him say in the middle of the night "I hate you mommy."

WTF QT?

The best sleeper is the Lady. Although she has insisted on sleeping in a night cap, which is a Santa hat she got for her first Christmas and that is barely fitting over her 6-year-old head. She is also insisting on wearing it to school. I have given up on fighting that battle. Can't wait to see what pajama combination she picks out for her Holiday Pajama Brunch on Friday. Will try to get a photo!

On a positive note, I did get a little wrapping done last night. I am now unsure if I have gotten enough for everyone or too much for everyone. Looking forward to my husband getting home so I can leave him with all the kids and make an unnecessary stop at Target to just load up on stocking junk and toothbrushes! Merry! Merry!

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The Little Lady glued three, colored 8.5x11 pieces of paper to the wood floor in her room.

Oh Elmer, you are lucky it was your glue and not super glue or glitter glue. I guess I was lucky she wasn't playing on the rug.

These types of things seem to be happening with greater frequency in my house if that gives you any indication of how things have been going this fine holiday season.

QT wrote with permanent markers on my refrigerator (thank goodness for the magic eraser), he also upended a huge container of Rainbow Loom rubber bands that we have almost gotten back into the bin (on a side note, I do kind of find the sorting and organizing of the bands quite soothing, especially after trying to subdue the copious amounts of rage-a-hol pulsing through my bloodstream after finding paper glued to the floor).

The Lady insists that none of the messes have been made by her (although she is the one who was using the permanent markers for an art project and then left them out).

The one positive outcome of all this mess is that it has given me the impetuous to just get rid of stuff.

You can't play with it and put it away? Gone.

And I am talking garbage gone.

As much as I am trying to remember the meaning of this season, be grateful for the imagination and creativity of my glue and permanent marker-bearing children, I am wondering why I am even working myself up about bringing more stuff into our house, especially if it isn't going to be taken care of by the kids.

We need nothing else and clearly I am having trouble trying to get them to take care of the things that they have. I am trying to find a way to teach them about the spirit and magic of Christmas and about caring for people other than themselves in this world. It sometimes gets lost between Christmas lists, 50% off sales, and that freaking Elf.

The Elf, who the Ladies left a strawberry out for because they were concerned he didn't have enough time to eat during his nightly excursion to the North Pole, "found" a dry erase board and a marker and compiled a Naughty List with the names of the Three Beans listed. Not my proudest moment as a mother.

The Ladies came down to find the Elf holding the pen, sitting next to a half-eaten strawberry and on top of a dry erase board that listed them as naughty.

The Lady couldn't tolerate that for a second and found a way to remove the pen, without touching the Elf, and change naughty to nice. Not sure if that lesson sunk in.

I love that my kids are at the age that they can all play together relatively unsupervised and that they enjoy each others company. Granted, we have a few minor incidents but overall they have fun together. I just wonder why it is at always at bedtime when I am at my lowest and just ready to crash that things seem to go so astray. Maybe I throw away a few more plastic things I find on the floor, maybe I just let them turn their room into one big art installation, but in the spirit of the season, why can't they just be good for goodness sake?

Thursday, December 5, 2013

. . .Unless of course you have spent the last three days sifting through the poo in your 2-year-old's diaper trying to find the penny he swallowed on Sunday night.

I guess it was good luck that I actually found it, clearly we tried to drive home the message of not putting anything in your mouth, and Lord knows this mamma needs a little luck in her life, but this wasn't quite the way I was looking to find it.

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It is full on holiday time and this year I wanted to be organized and ready to go. I had my Christmas cards ordered and delivered by mid-November, I made lists for gifts for the kids, cousins (and even myself) prior to Thanksgiving and had an Amazon cart full and ready for purchase come Cyber Monday.

Not wanting to dive right into the Christmas season and bypass Thanksgiving, I decided that we would get all the decorations down post-Turkey day.

We had a busy four days. We were all over the place and we had a great time seeing family and friends. However, by the time we got back to our place on Sunday around 2:30 we were all done. I tried to ignore the list of things that needed to be done.

Number 1 on that list? The Elf on the Shelf.

Here is where the mommy mind melt kicks in. I have a vivid recollection of talking to my husband about the fact that we had to put the Elf on the Shelf away last year. He was still hanging around post-holiday tree take down and I wanted to make sure the kids didn't discover him on my husband's dresser.

I also kind of remember putting it in a bin.

Fast forward to 8:30 Sunday night, we were about 2 hours post-penny swallow and the kids were in their beds but not quite sleeping.

I sent my husband out to bring down the decorations from the attic of the garage as I tried to decide the best place to put the Elf. He called me from the garage to let me know he couldn't find it and he had looked in "a lot of bins."

I love my husband. He does a ton for our family, but less than 24-hours earlier this conversation happened while he was looking through our diaper bag in order to change QT.

Sweet Husband: Where are the wipes?
Me: They are in the bag.
Sweet Husband: I don't see them, are you sure you put them in here? (Add some tone to this.)
Me: Yes. They are in the bag.
Sweet Husband: They aren't in the bag.
Me: Ok. I am sure there are some wipes here. (We were at his sister's house and there were like 10 kids there)

One minute later I look in the bag and there are the wipes. I am not saying he didn't look for them, I am just saying maybe he should have looked a little harder. So, I was a bit skeptical that he couldn't find the Elf on the Shelf.

The next morning the Lady came down looking for the Elf. I did some quick thinking and said that he didn't come because we didn't read the book first. She bought this as an excuse and I told her he would come that night.

I got home from work and headed straight to the garage. I looked in the Christmas bins that my husband brought down. No Elf. I looked in a lot of bins in the attic of the garage and guess what? That's right we have a ton of stuff that we don't need and don't use up there. There is also a ton of stuff that I would love to use if we just had a little more room! Also, no Elf.

We put the kids to bed, I pulled on a heavy sweatshirt and headed out again. 40 minutes later. . .no luck. WTF? Where was this Elf? Was I going to have to go out to Target at 9:30 p.m. and spend another 30 bucks on this thing? Ugh.

My husband said he would go pick up a new one, but first maybe we should look under our bed. Lo and behold, there he was in his box, hanging out for a year or so, just waiting for us to remember that we never even took him out of the house.

Victory was mine that night and the kids couldn't have been more excited to see him the next morning. Please remind me to move him tonight though!

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This is an actual conversation that took place last night as the Little Lady was once again on our bed a full hour and a half after bedtime. My husband was watching some sports talk show on HBO about the documentary "Trophy Kids." They showed a clip of the doc with a little girl golfing. Here is what followed:

Little Lady: Do you remember when Tiger Woods cheated on his wife?
Husband and Me: Um. . .yes
Little Lady: That wasn't very nice of him and now she doesn't even want to be around him anymore.
Husband: Yeah, he wasn't very nice.
Little Lady: I think she went and moved in with her dad.

Actually Little Lady, I am pretty sure she knocked down and rebuilt some huge palatial home in Florida and is dating her neighbor, but I am sure her parents wouldn't have minded if she moved back in.